Karan Mahendra Bansal’s thesis, Overwhelmed: Work, Play, Time, and Design, investigates Time Poverty in the context of knowledge workers. Defined as the state or condition in which an individual lacks the discretionary time required for activities to build their social and human capital, he asserts that the underlying reason for Time Poverty is not the lack of time, but the lack of choice. Roughly 80% of American knowledge workers feel that they never have enough time to do the things they want to, and collectively fail to utilize approximately 700 million vacation days each year. Startled by the magnitude of this fact, Karan began to explore our complicated relationship with time.

Bethany Fronhofer, who was homeschooled for the majority of her school years, has experienced many types of learning. These ranged from training a team of oxen to writing fiction to taking traditional math and science classes. As a hands-on learner, she was dissatisfied with the heavy bias toward lectures and reading/writing assignments in public school classes. Her thesis, The Uncommon Core: A Design Exploration of Active Education for Kinesthetic Learners, questions how and why educational design prioritizes some styles of learning over others and creates a space to consider new ways of including hands-on learning in curriculums and educational environments.